February 2012 ~ PageLight

Tuesday 28 February 2012

The First and Last Request

How do I know anything at all? How do I know knowing, how do I know truth? How can I trust and believe? The concept of 'God' is a difficult one, as any teenager worth his salt will tell you. It lies like a deadweight across our freedom, an affront to our independence. And yet does the physical world itself have truth? Do we trust 'things' just because we bump off them? The spiritual element is always the forgotten one, like an imaginary friend, a child in the room you can't see. After all how do you know life except by its pulse, how do you know truth except by its current? In other words you know them by a refined inner sense which is simple and pure like a child's understanding. This sense is not suggestible, it's not open to figments or make-believe. To let this pulse of life or current of truth live in you is to overcome the deadweight of concepts.

But then there are the concepts which are so far-reaching they would have the inner teenager stomping out of the room in disgust. Such a one is 'resurrection'. How can we start again with ideas like that? Not in a religious sense but as a principle in nature and in the human being which we can feel as a current? For me it's an existential thing - the first and last request. I believe I came into the world asking if the body and the earth itself would be lifted up at the end of days into the pure spiritual existence I know by inner nature. I believe it's a childlike question. Not just, 'Is there a heaven?' but, 'Can everything I love go there?' And it's a question of justice (also beloved of children): 'Is it right to leave anything behind?' Can we really accept that our speck of dust in the cosmos will be wiped out?

The child dreams in simple inner truth, the teenager boils with indignation. What does the adult do? Have we reached adulthood yet? No, we can't accept deadweights or suggestions but neither can we ignore the child in the room, the imaginary friend. We have to learn to re-enter the refined inner sense for what is true and what lives. We have to keep the anger, the refusal to be fobbed-off. In the end, in that maturity, I believe it's possible to approach such great ideas as that of 'resurrection' and to feel the spiritual pull which will tell us beyond doubt if the first and last request can be answered.

Jay

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Author: Jay Landar
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Friday 24 February 2012

Shrine

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I struggle to catch sight of the eternal. My faith is weak to aspire beyond myself. I seem to see the temple but no god within it. I discover the whole of creation, to the outermost limits of the universe, but no gate to let me through.

What are all these stories of transcendent self and mystical union? Just another barrier of words? Ah, but I find the simple heart of the fairy-tale more easy to comprehend! I will search to the very ends of the earth to find the purple flower which will heal my loved one. It lies hidden beside a crumbling wall. It lives in my dreams.

There is incorruptible beauty in the flower. Do I seek permanence? Never! What grows and blossoms fades and dies as well. Everything born in time and in creation passes away. But the beauty and its power of healing remain constant. The image of the loved one dwells inside the flower. I will take this flower and lay it beyond the crumbling wall - within duration.

Then finally I see that I myself am the threshold. I am myself what lies beyond the outer gate. Creation's temple is my own being - it lies in my own aspiring to find the god within.

Jay

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Chance

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Chance is such a flighty and whimsical thing - or is it? Chance doesn't exist at all except that our imagination furnishes it with laws and opportunities - or does it? Chance is a curse to the cursed and a boon to the blessed - or are curses and blessings merely fictions of the human soul?

As an unashamed romantic I see Chance as a second world within the first. It moves or slides seamlessly under the surface of the world we think we live on. This first world is a fiction: a strange, glittering, gleaming fantasy we think is fixed in place by our deeds and decisions. In reality the mutable world of Chance slides unseen beneath our feet.

With regard to this world of chance we are static. It rotates and then stops, delivering its exotic locations to our side. It is like water - a moving, watery pathway. But is it arbitrary in its movements? Does it by any chance bring us what we need? Or - more ominously - what we deserve? Can we influence it by our own actions?

I won't even attempt to be scientific here. I won't talk about cause and effect, or the laws of karma. I know the hard blows of life as much as anyone. But I will talk about goodness and mercy - and love. I do believe that goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life. I believe this despite the blows. And goodness and mercy also belong to that second world - the world of Chance. In believing in them I step out of the glittering fantasy world of 'reality' and into a moving, watery continuum. I also believe that this second world, in its rotating, stops for me exactly beside love, as often as it can - like a globe bringing a new country to my side.

So can we influence it by our actions? Not exactly. But prayers are as sacred as roses on thorn. Their urgency and repetition grow upwards to the very hand that turns the globe. That hand, the hand of 'Chance', knows exactly where to stop the spinning.

Jay

Friday 17 February 2012

Penitent

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It is the time of year when the hosts of Persephone begin to rise out of the earth. The time of mercy and unseen justice. I stand here a penitent. The sins I have committed lie buried deep in the earth. I have to find them again and color them green.

The lenten trees are massive now, giants

high above my bench in the penitents' glade.

But some unrepentant blue tits dip

to the level of my thoughts and flash

around the nascent daffodils, yellow

before yellow was ever conceived.

Song

prevails over process, over footstep:

the highest note beyond the range of ears,

rationale of reaching and removing.

I hear it now and always do. Always.

Even the simple act of looking up

is metaphor for justice that I seek:

the transformation of straining prayer

into many-colored forgiveness -

and such a one as will absolve the sins

I have no memory of committing.

I stand judged by the all-believing birds,

the towering trees whose gift it is to smile

into greenliness and wisdom and peace.

Jay

Friday 10 February 2012

My Shadow and I

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My shadow, meanwhile, is bundled up inside me like a lonely cloud rolled up with many others to form a single thick covering overhead. I long for the clarification of sunlight to let my shadow stand proud of me. But I know too that I have to draw my shadow out, to pull it into the light. If it appears too soon will it have found release? Or will it be forced to retreat again into its undistinguished cover?

I don't know what this shadow is. It represents the degree to which I have clarified myself. I am not fit to stand under a new sun unless I have expelled this blackness. It is the darkness of the year, the cold, the unloved, the hurting side of me. It is the side which must crave its own excess until it can bear it no longer. I love my shadow and my shadow pretends to love me. But really it sings its song for the lost sunlight it remembers like a dim dream. It holds its candle for that light.

I'll make myself clear by living out of the light. I'll shun the early growth and wait for the full tide of spring. I'll talk to my shadow, creep into its lair, tease it out from its own concealed shape. We'll become friends, my shadow and I. I'll tell it stories of life under the sun, of creatures that fly, of leaves that light like candles. I'll promise not to leave its side. At last, in trust and faith that day will come when I can lead my shadow out from me, into the open silence, the cloudless light. And then I will know I have arrived.

Yes, hearth, light, song – these things have moved away;
disgruntled skies pour answers on the earth
to questions no one asked or thought to say:
do we grow old for nothing? has life worth?
I would stay buried, hibernating deep,
unless I thought my shadow could appear
above the ground, and stay and feel life leap -
but still I’d need to know what makes it dear.

Jay

Tuesday 7 February 2012

The Softer Side of Any Hand

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The weakest are strongest. From those who've been given much, much is expected. How can I line up these two thoughts? Well, in the first place, no privileges, advancements, gifts lie within your keep except that they were given to you. Does it make sense to flaunt them like an ornamental cloak? It's not up to you to take pride in your abilities and opportunities as such - if they were given to you they can just as easily be taken away. No - something else comes into the picture which is even more important. Gifts are only half the story - they do not represent strength.

It depends very much on how you turn your hand. The softer side of any hand should be turned towards the open palm of one who asks. For many people the ground quakes beneath their unprotected heels and toes. (This is a story of hands and feet.) Do you notice them on your path of personal advancement? Do you take in the ones who don't have the privileges and opportunities? The gift they offer is an unseen one: they offer you the gift to advance. This strength is invisible.

We are all in positions of weakness or strength at different times in life. The relationship of the open palm and softer side of the hand applies to us all. To continue on your personal path without noticing someone's weakness is to miss an opportunity - the opportunity to give something of your strength and gifts, despite all the complications that might be involved.

I say this because at a certain point you arrive at a gate or a threshold and crave entrance. It might be at the end of life or at some other critical point. And what do you find at this threshold? You find yourself as gatekeeper. How mortifying not to be allowed in by your own self! The gatekeeper - yourself - announces that your privileges, gifts and strengths are as nothing. They are incomplete, they are one side of a coin - unless they are matched by a gift which comes from the weakest: the gift to notice, to help, to offer the soft side of your hand.

In this way the weakest are strongest. From those who've been given much, much is expected. I don't say this as someone who has noticed all his life. Unfortunately not. But neither have I completely walked along in my ornamental cloak. The point is that there is no advancement without taking others along with you. Even if you are alone you have to take others. I'm aware of this door or threshold. I'm alarmed by the shadow of my own self raising a forbidding hand. Have I done enough to go forward? Hmm.

Jay

Friday 3 February 2012

Silvered Beams and Golden Flares

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From one point of view dreams, symbols, imaginings - for example, poems or paintings - are figures, shape-shifted from our daily lives. A poem, then, might reshape a lost love affair; a painting, a phase in life. Psycho-analysis might justifiably point out the various sublimations taking place in our thoughts and images. Dreams are famous for this: not one element in a dream, down to the smallest detail, is without its transformed reference. On a larger scale a work of art might sublimate - consciously or unconsciously - a whole range of complexes. These might be individual, social, or universal human complexes, perhaps relating to a particular point of time - these are the symbols and metaphors of the national spirit or the Zeitgeist. Ultimately, a great work of art will configure divine, spiritual truths not accessible to ordinary, daily consciousness.

What does all this tell us? It tells us that we belong under particular skies, within a pattern of moon-shine, solar flares, stellar movement. We are geocentric - figures of earth, belonging to a landscape, to our own or to someone else's portrait. In a sense we unearth our dreams from a particular position in time or space.

Is there any alternative to this? Well, we can turn the whole thing on its head and look at it from another point of view. From this perspective life itself is the dream or art-form. Our bodies, our surroundings, the earth itself are images of a higher imagination. This greater artistic power configures everything that happens to us - down to the smallest detail - according to a far wider pattern of necessity. The movements and purposes of this necessity are hidden in the formation of stars and planets not visible to our ordinary perception. This is the heliocentric position. Human life is made up of these two different frames of reference.

Our task is not merely to sublimate - although we will continue to do that as well - but to learn how to step up out of the layers of earth with free will, and consciously. No longer to be simply shaped by the silvered moonbeams and golden solar flares but - in a way - to skirt around the eye of God and to work out of our own free inner movements. I believe, then, that we can escape the two-sided necessity of dream: that in our actions we shape-shift our unconscious experiences, and that the life of our planet itself is simply the artwork in the mind of a cosmic dreamer.

It is the destiny of the human being to take a place midway between the geocentric and the heliocentric. And I find this difficult to accept because my heart hurts to leave things behind and change the shape of my dreams.

Jay

Welcome to PageLight! Take a walk with author and poet Jay Landar through worlds of fantasy, inspiration and insight. On the way you will see the people and problems of today - the trials of the globe we all inhabit as it grows towards a new era. Find the truth of the inner self and the gentle light it sheds on these struggles - a light which can only grow stronger. Romance, Truth and Beauty are the keywords of PageLight. Please join me on our walk through these worlds!

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